A Year in Reading: Stephen Dodson

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I thought I was pretty familiar with Alexander Herzen. I’d read Isaiah Berlin’s articles on him and parts of his autobiography, and I could have told a good story about how as a teenager he swore an oath to fight tsarist tyranny, how he fled Russia for Western Europe and established the first free Russian press, and how he was vilified by both conservatives and radicals for his unfashionably nuanced views. All of that is true, but in reading Aileen M. Kelly’s new biography, The Discovery of Chance, I found that I really knew hardly anything about him. In the first place, he studied the natural sciences in college rather than history or philosophy like almost every other socially aware student of his generation, and this gave him the lens through which he viewed everything else: man was part of nature, and history was the product of natural laws. He had this crucial insight before Charles Darwin, and publicized it long before Darwin dared to. Furthermore, history, like life in general, was driven by chance rather than any kind of higher plan; it wasn’t heading inevitably toward a socialist paradise or any other destination. This idea was unacceptable to almost everyone then and is resisted even now, and Herzen himself took many years to assimilate it. Herzen’s twin emphases on truth and freedom carried him through to conclusions that still have the power to surprise and provoke: “There is no universally valid idea from which man has not woven a rope to bind his own feet, and if possible, the feet of others as well…Love, friendship, tribal loyalty, and finally even love of freedom have served as inexhaustible sources of moral oppression and servitude.” He opposed what he called “the mysticism of science,” and asked his fellow radicals “why belief in God is ridiculous and belief in humanity is not.”

Kelly maintains a fine balance between the events of his life and the intellectual currents that shaped him; she has useful summaries of the work and ideas of thinkers like Georges Cuvier, Buffon, Montesquieu, and Emmanuel Kant, and a paragraph on Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling explains that mistily transcendental philosopher in a way that for the first time gives me an idea of what he meant and why he was so popular. She gives vivid descriptions of radicals like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin, who had a huge influence on both Herzen and all of Europe. She seems to have absorbed everything relevant to her subject, and she challenges received opinion with brio. As I was reading it, I was thinking that anyone interested in the intellectual life of the 19th century would profit from this book, but having finished it, I think anyone interested in intellectual life, period, should get it. It’s the best work of history or biography I’ve read in a long time.

Robert Bartlett’sThe Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950-1350 is an absorbing and detailed analysis of medieval history; his discussions of the interplay between the military and social meanings of words for “knight,” the history and spread of the general label “Frank” (“The classic enterprise which stimulated the use of this term was the crusade, the ‘Deeds of the Franks’ as its earliest chronicler called it”), race relations in the frontier zone of Latin Europe (“If we define, say, ‘German’ and ‘Slav’ by customs, language and law rather than by descent, the grandchildren of Slavs could be Germans, the grandchildren of Germans Slavs”), and localized repertoires of names (“It is easy, given a few personal names, to tell which region or ethnic group is being talked about”) kept me reading with interest and taught me a great deal.

David Stahel’sKiev 1941 shows that Adolf Hitler’s war in the east was lost by the end of August 1941; the rest was a long, drawn-out, incredibly destructive demonstration of that fact, with the Soviet advantage in manpower and resupply grinding down the German war machine. Hitler and Joseph Stalin both made major errors, but Stalin learned from his and started letting his generals make decisions; Hitler learned nothing and insisted more and more on his unique genius. This is a superb book of military history, with a fresh and convincing analysis.

Like so many other people, I devoured Elena Ferrante’s glorious Neapolitan quartet; when I was done, I had a Naples itch, and to scratch it I finally read my ancient copies of John Horne Burns’sThe Gallery and Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44, and was bowled over by both. The first, a set of stories whose characters often find themselves in the Galleria Umberto in downtown Naples, won renown when it was published in 1947 (John Dos Passos called it “the first book of real magnitude to come out of the last war”) but seems to have been forgotten along with its author, who faded quickly; NYRB Classics revived it a few years ago, and I hope it regains its deserved high reputation. Lewis was a British intelligence officer before he became one of the finest travel writers of the last century, and his account of his experience mediating between the triumphant Allies and the starving but resourceful Neapolitans is alternately funny, horrifying, and just plain humane. Together they provide a stereoscopic view of a time and place that will help Ferrante readers understand the world her characters were shaped by, and will help any reader understand the behavior of armies among civilian populations.

Also during 2016 I went on a Herman Melville binge (Moby-Dick is as great as I remembered, Israel Potter was surprisingly enjoyable, and The Confidence-Man turns out to be an amazing novel the vision of which is too dark to allow it the popularity it merits), and my wife and I continue to make our way through Anthony Trollope (we’re not enjoying the parliamentary novels as much as the Barchester series so far, but that’s a high bar, and we’re only up to Phineas Finn).

So much of what I read is for work (editing Dorothy, a publishing project, and teaching at Washington University in St. Louis), but I did manage some stellar outside reading in 2016. These were my favorites of the “freebies:”

1. Suzanne Buffam’sA Pillow Book: smart, unpretentious, unclassifiable. With an obvious nod to Sei Shōnagon’s 10th-century The Pillow Book, Buffam’s is a fragmented essay-poem-meditation on insomnia, motherhood, marriage, and other “hateful” things. It’s littered with lists, delightfully funny (or just delightful), such as “Moustaches A-Z,” “Things That Give a Dirty Feeling,” or “Jobs from Hell.” Here’s one:
SOUNDS I DON’T EXPECT TO HEAR

Solar wind.
A rose opening.
Silence on the 4th of July.
The mating cry of the King Island Emu.
Hecklers at the ballet.
Foghorns in the Mare Cognitum.
Melting cheese.
A rich man entering Heaven.
A poor man entering the Senate.
Pure math.2. Renee Gladman’sCalamities: It would be hard to overstate my sense of Gladman’s importance to contemporary American letters. Calamities is a series of short linked essays (or, as I’ve heard her call them, ditties) most of which begin “I began the day …” It’s embodied, subtle, playful, rare.

3. & 4. Barbara Comyns’sOur Spoon’s Came from Woolworth and Sylvia Townsend Warner’sLolly Willowes: Or the Loving Huntsman: The Comyns and the Townsend Warner are reprints somewhat recently published in the U.S. by NYRB. I loved both to an aggressive degree, especially Lolly Willowes, which sneaks up on you with its ferocity, so sharp and erotic and free.

Finally, my “year in reading” wouldn’t be complete without The Babysitter at Rest by Jen George and Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger (translated from the French by Cécile Menon & Natasha Lehrer). These are the books I spent the most time with, the ones I was able to get seriously and satisfyingly intimate with. Meanwhile, here at Dorothy we’ve begun putting together a book we’re nuts about for Fall 2017: the first ever Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington.

Thanks for this. Two elderly couples in my building were around during the Battle of Kiev – remarkable folks, all. This isn’t a criticism, but what you refer to as “Soviet advantage in manpower and resupply” one of those neighbors calls “the meatgrinder.” The male population in these parts has yet to recover.

A question about the source material: I haven’t read it yet, but a friend tells me there’s a conspicuous lack of Cyrillic alphabet in Stahel’s bibliography. If that’s correct, I wonder, with the abundance of Russian resources now available, wouldn’t their exclusion render his argument problematic? Or at least somewhat (anachronistically) premature?

Love the blog, too! Just when I thought I had my reading under control.

This isn’t a criticism, but what you refer to as “Soviet advantage in manpower and resupply” one of those neighbors calls “the meatgrinder.” The male population in these parts has yet to recover.

Oh, absolutely, but of course this is a work of military history, so the perspective is different. The more I read about the Eastern Front, the more appalled I am at the unimaginable suffering it produced.

As for the lack of Russian sources in Stahel’s bibliography, that’s true, I don’t think he reads Russian, but the focus of the book is on the German army; he’s clearly read a great deal about the Russian side as well and knows what was going on there, but it’s not the focus, and his conclusions seem sound to me.

Arthur Phillips is the bestselling author of The Egyptologist and Prague, which was a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. His most recent novel, Angelica, comes out in paperback in February.I admit to having bought a book for its cover. For years I had seen the four spines of Anthony Powell’sA Dance to the Music of Time lined up on bookstore shelves and admired them, wished the spines – which together form a Poussin painting – were up on my own. And so I bought the first book, dove in for no reason except coveting the covering, without having any idea what I was about to read.I emerged from the fourth volume six months later, having read nothing but Powell in the intervening time, and having completed one of the great reading experiences of my life, truly distraught that it was over.Pretentious claim, for which I apologize, but here it is: a few years earlier, I read the whole damn In Search of Lost Time (or whatever you want to call it), and the payoff at its end, after all the toil and pleasure, is no more powerful than a similar payoff at the end of Powell. You finish both with the sensation of having spent a long lifetime at the side of the narrator. You have the same feeling of nostalgia, profundity, passing years, lives led and finished, the power of a master of letters guiding you to the illusion of lived experience.That said, Powell is also funny, really funny, which is a claim I do not think can be made for Proust without straining something – credulity or a groin muscle.More from A Year in Reading 2007

Sarah Weinman is the proprietor of Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind. A freelance writer based in New York, she is the Baltimore Sun’s crime fiction columnist and writes “Dark Passages,” a monthly online mystery & suspense column for the Los Angeles Times Book Review. In a parallel life, she has a master’s degree in forensic science and still harbours faint hopes of actually making use of it.Here are a few books that particularly struck my fancy in 2007:1.Bloodbrothers, by Richard Price – I’m on a bit of a Price kick this year so I can get his entire backlist read by the time his new book comes out, and this, his second novel, is really something special. I totally empathized with Stony’s attempts to make something of himself and get out of his Bronx life, yet still very much tied to the neighborhood and to his family.2.12:23 by Eoin McNamee – sure, it’s about the death of Princess Diana, but it’s more about the burnt-out spooks and mystery makers descending upon Paris leading up to the crash. If Graham Greene had lived to write about the death of Di, this would have been the result.3.Farthing by Jo Walton – I loved the sequel, Ha’ Penny, but I suggest everyone pick this up first – how does a traditional mystery mask an astounding alternate history that could be true if not for a couple of history’s fate twists? I still don’t know, but Walton clearly does.4.The Late George Apley, by John P. Marquand – Several friends have been after me to read his work, and I tracked this down and loved it. The satire is gentle yet devastating, as is the portrait of family mistakes repeating themselves with often emotionally tragic consequences.5.The White Bone, by Barbara Gowdy – she creates great characters out of a herd of elephants. Enough said.More from A Year in Reading 2007